DEATH AND BIRTH OF JUDAISM
(Basic Books, 1987)
By Jacob Neusner
Reviewed by John J. Mulloy
The importance of Christian culture in history and the influence it
has had upon society, is seen indirectly in a thesis proposed by Jacob
Neusner in his book, Death and Birth of Judaism. Professor Neusner is a
member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South
Florida in Tampa and St. Petersburg. According to Neusner, there is a
close link between historical developments in the Christian world and the
effect these have had upon the development of new religious understandings
in Judaism, and upon the social structures which these brought into being.
For Neusner, the formation of what he terms the Judaism of the dual
Torah,that is, the ideas and outlook which governed the Jewish people from
the 4th to the 18th century, was a consequence of Judaism's response to
the Christian ascendancy in society after the conversion of Constantine.
It was in this society of the later Roman Empire, now dominated by
Christian ideas and practices, that the Jews needed to interpret in
providential terms the nature of what had happened which had reduced them
to the status of a tolerated religious minority.
This thesis proposed by Neusner is quite different from the older
idea held by most Jewish scholars, which saw Judaism as being unaffected
by Christianity, living its ownlife insulated from what was going forward
in the Christian world. While Jewish communities might be subjected to
persecution upon occasion, and have social disabilities imposed upon them,
their interior life, and their interpretation of the meaning of Judaism,
remained quite unchanged.
Here is how Professor Neusner sets forth his thesis in the first
chapter of his book:
"We adopt as our premise the view that Judaisms respond to the
questions of the religious world around them but also shape that
world. The argument here, for example, is that Judaisms answer
questions forced upon Israel, the Jewish people, by important
shifts in political facts. Historians of Judaism, both the
Orthodox and the Zionist ones, for example, however, take as
dogma the view that (because God revealed the Torah, which is
beyond the control of man, or because the Jews are a distinct
nation, utterly separate from all other nations) Christianity
never made any difference to Judaism (any more than did Islam, a
totally distinct set of problems). Faith of a `people that
dwells apart' (these historians hold), Judaism went its
splendid, solitary way, exploring paths untouched (for instance)
by Christians. Christianity (the theory goes) was born in the
matrix of Judaism; but Judaism, from then to now, officially
ignored the new `daughter' religion and followed its majestic
course in aristocratic isolation. Since, moreover, Judaism (in
any form) is supposed always to have ignored, and never to have
been affected by, Christianity in any form (the implicit
argument), the future security of the faith of Judaism requires
continuing this same policy, pretending that Christianity simply
never made, and does not now make, any difference at all to
Israel, the Jewish people. Here I treat that dogma as
irrelevant. In my view--as I demonstrate in chapter 1--the
Jews' world view and way of life began by taking full account of
the political situation of Israel, the Jewish people, as a
subordinated but tolerated polity."
In contrast to that accepted view, Neusner presents his own
interpretation of how Judaism of the dual Torah came into being and how
centuries later, it came to an end as a result of important changes which
occurred in the Christian world. These exercised a determinative
influence upon Judaism's own interpretation of its role in history:
"The Judaism that died and in new expressions came to rebirth in
modern times addressed a set of urgent questions, and, for its
followers, who included most Jews in the world, answered those
questions with truths deemed self-evident. The birth of the
Judaism that died in modern times had taken place fourteen
hundred years earlier, inthe year 312--that is, the year of
Constantine's victory and accession to the throne of Rome after
a vision of a cross and the words, `By this sign you will
conquer.' That moment marked the beginning of Western
civilization, for in it was born the Christian polity, which
until nearly our own day has defined the civilization of the
West. With Constantine, Christianity became the definitive
power in the politics of the West. It died in 1787, with the
American Constitution (as we Americans would see matters) or
with the French Revolution (as Europeans might prefer). Then
Christianity began its journey out of its dominant position in
the center of the political arena. The Judaism that flourished
in Christendom and in Islam addressed the questions of Judaic
polity in a subordinated but tolerated status--that is, the
polity that came into being in 312. That same Judaism passed
away in 1787 (as we would see it) or in 1789 (as Europeans would
prefer), when a new and different set of questions impressed
large numbers of Jews as urgent. Those questions concerned not
a Judaic polity but the Jewish citizen, not the collectivity but
the individual. Answers to these questions constituted the
Judaisms aborning in modern times."
The way in which Judaism was an essential part of the Providential
purpose of history held by both Christianity and Islam, so that
differences of interpretation coexisted with an agreement on the control
of history by the God Whom Israel worshipped, is explained by Neusner in
this manner:
"Christianity defines the starting point; and, its demise, the
death of that Judaism. For the Judaic system at hand, the one
that flourished through the history of the West as Christendom,
took up the challenge of Christianity and therefore explained to
Jews the context and meaning of Israel, political and
supernatural alike. Christianity (and, in its time and place,
Islam as well) took for granted the fundamental facticity of
Israel's claim to form not only a distinct, but a distinctive
and special, nation in God's commonwealth. According special
status to Israel, Christendom and Islam affirmed the biblical
picture, though, of course, modifying it in light of what each
deemed further chapters in the sacred history. True,
Christianity would further maintain that the Church formed the
new Israel; that along with the Hebrew Scriptures, a further set
of holy books, the New Testament, contained the word of God.
Along these same lines, Islam held that, beyond Moses, then
Jesus, Mohammed formed the seal of prophecy, the Quran, God's
last and perfect word. But both Christianity and Islam saw
Israel, the Jewish people, within the same supernatural view of
a world created and governed by one God, who had revealed
Himself to Israel (if also through Jesus Christ and the prophet
Mohammed), a viewcontained within the Hebrew Scriptures revered,
also, by Israel, the Jewish people."
The nature of the Jewish response allowed the Jewish people to
understand that God had not deserted Israel but would keep His promises to
her. This would be at a future time which has a certain approximation to
the Christian expectation of the Second Coming of Christ, although
obviously Christ would be absent from the expected Jewish fulfillment of
prophecy. Once this belief in Judaism's place in history, and in God's
providential plan for Israel, had been formulated, and had answered the
question of Judaism's subordinate status in a Christian world, it acquired
for Jews the character of a self-evident fact.
"The advent of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire
made acute a long-standing chronic crisis in the divine economy,
and thus determined the agenda of the Judaism that reached
written expression at the end of the fourth century. This, the
Judaism of the dual Torah, mediated between the expectation and
the reality. Answering all of the questions then and, for the
history of the Christian West, afterward pressing upon Israel,
this Judaism explained the Jews' distinctive way of life in the
here and now as a medium of sanctification and promised in
response to acceptance of its subordinated political position
and adherence to its way-of-life salvation in the end of days.
Challenging Israel to explain itself, Christendom and Islam
therefore received from the Judaism of the dual Torah those
answers that, for Israel, constituted self-evident truth: the
way of life, the world view, formed by a concrete Israel, that
in that time and place constituted a Judaism. Specifically, the
urgent and inescapable question answered by the Judaism that
first took shape in response to the rise of Christianity
addressed the standing and status of Israel in a world in the
charge of others than Israel."
What brought that particular Judaism to an end and made its worldview
no longer self-evident to Jews was the secularization that overtook the
Christian West in the 19th and 20th centuries. This new development
required a new set of answers from Jews as to the meaning of their place
in history. Several different kinds of response were made to this
question. Neusner speaks of each of them as a different Judaism from what
had existed from the 4th to the 18th century, and different also from each
other. Thus there were several different Judaisms formulated in the 19th
and 20th centuries, all of them seeking to provide a satisfying answer to
the meaning of Jewish existence in a world which secularization had
brought into being.
"Redefining the political civilization of the West, a vast
process of secularization removed Christianity--first in the
Protestant West, then in the Roman Catholic center and south,
and finally in the Christian Orthodox (Greek,Russian) east, of
Europe--from its established position as the definitive force.
Throughout the nineteenth century, far-reaching political
movements--appealing to the nation-state and to man as the
measure of all things, rather than to the kingdom of God and to
heaven's will--set forth a new politics. That program of
secularization raised a fresh set of questions also for Israel,
the Jewish people. In the nature of things, these had nothing
whatever to do with Israel's supernatural standing in God's plan
for creation and the history of humanity. Posed by political
changes--as much as the original questions had taken political
form--the new set of urgent concerns engaged many Jews, at first
particularly in western European countries, later on in the
eastern European ones and in their extension in America, in a
new set of inquiries. These inquiries produced a fresh program
of self-evident answers, and those answers in the nineteenth
century constituted a new set of Judaisms."
In Neusner's idea of the death and birth of Judaism, and Judaism's
need to adapt to changing social conditions which faced it, there may be
some parallel to Chesterton's speaking of "The Five Deaths of the Faith,"
followed by unexpected resurrections. This is the title of the
penultimate chapter in Chesterton's The Everlasting Man 1925), as he saw
the history of Christianity. The model he drew upon was the Life of
Christ, with the same pattern being repeated in the life of His Church.
Thus the Christianity that comes back from apparent death is the same
Christianity which existed before, but now making its response to new
social conditions. In Neusner's book, it is not quite clear whether he
sees the essentials of Judaism maintained in each of the several different
Judaisms which he identifies.
This idea of the resurrection of Christianity from apparent death is
also a theme in Lord Macaulay's review of Leopold Ranke's History of the
Popes. Looking at the condition of the Catholic Church in 1840, some
forty years or more after its apparent demise at the time of the French
Revolution, Macaulay writes:
"It is not strange that in the year 1799, even sagacious
observers should have thought that, at length, the hour of the
Church of Rome had come. An infidel power ascendant, the Pope
dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France
living in a foreign country on Protestant alms... --Such signs
might well be supposed to indicate the approaching end of that
long domination.
"But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white
hind was still fated not to die. [This milk-white hind is a
poetic term for the Catholic Church.]... Anarchy had had its
day. A new order of things arose out of the confusion, new
dynasties, new laws; and amidst them emerged the ancient
religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was
built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men,
bore the weight of the Flood. Such as this was the fate ofthe
Papacy. It had been buried under the great inundation; but its
deep foundations remained unshaken; and, when the waters abated,
it appeared alone amidst the ruins of a world which had passed
away." Essay on Ranke's History of the Popes in Volume V of
Macaulay's Historical and Critical Essays, pp. 40-44.
Also, John Henry Newman, possibly influenced by this conception of
Macaulay, concludes his volume on The Development of Christian Doctrine
(1845) by writing in similar terms of the pattern to be observed in the
life of the Catholic Church over the centuries. Speaking of these
apparent deaths, or what he calls slumbers of the Church, Newman states:
"It is true there have been seasons, when, from the operation of
external or internal causes, the Church has been thrown into
what was almost a state of deliquium; but her wonderful
revivals, while the world was triumphing over her, is a further
evidence of the absence of corruption in the system of doctrine
and worship into which she has developed. Such has been the
slumber and such the restoration of the Church. She pauses in
her course, and almost suspends her functions: she rises again,
and she is herself once more; all things are in their place and
ready for action. Doctrine is where it was, and usage, and
precedent, and principle, and policy; there may be changes, but
they are consolidations or adaptations; all is unequivocal and
determinate, with an identity which there is no disputing." Chap
XI, no.9.
It should be noted that these different accounts of the history of
the Church - by Macualay, Newman, and Chesterton - have reference only to
the Catholic Church, not to the Protestant churches except as these
constitute one of the challenges which Catholicism has had to face in the
course of its history. It is the survival of the Catholic Church through
several different periods of decline and recovery which is the object of
their attention. The protestant version of ecclesiastical history saw the
Catholic Church in quite other terms. In their attempt to justify their
break with Rome and the Papacy, protestants presented the Catholic Church
as having become completely corrupt, and thus as having no possibility of
recovery. Christopher Dawson points out:
The result of this revolutionary attitude to the historic church was
a revolutionary, catastrophic, apocalyptic abd discontinuous view of
history. As Calvin writes, the history of the church is a series of
resurrections. Again and again the church becomes corrupt, the Word is no
longer preached, life seems extinct, until God once more sends forth
prophets and teachers to bear witness to the truth and to reveal the
evangelical doctrine in its pristine purity.
The Catholic conception is that of the Church as beingindefectible,
maintaining throughout the course of ages the truth entrusted to her by
her Founder. Nevertheless, in the idea of the revivifying influence upon
the life of the Church of martyrs and saints, who counter the forces of
evil which have found a foothold in the human element in the Church, the
Catholic vision of Church history does allow for some possible link to the
Protestant view.
In Neusner's view of the history of Judaism, he sees Judaism as
remaining basically the same from the fourth to the eighteenth centuries.
Now this is the period when the Catholic Church as seen by the writers I
have quoted underwent several periods of apparent death or decline and
then remarkable recovery, without having lost its basic character and
continuity with its past. Is it not possible that something similar may
be found in the history of Judaism? May there not have been periods of
great crisis in Judaism, which taxed its power of survival to the utmost
and its ability to maintain itself in a basic continuity with its early
teaching? External crisis which the Jewish community may have undergone
would most likely present a danger of internal crisis as well. One
thinks, for example of the widespread embrace by the Jews of Eastern
Europe in the seventeenth century of the pretensions of Sabbati Zevi to be
the Messiah, before he was finally discredited. Might not such a
development have caused an internal crisis in the Jewish community?
Professor Neusner tells us that the change for Jews from living
within the confines of Christendom as a tolerated minority culture to one
of having to face the problem of life within a non- Christian and
secularized society was so severe as to produce several different Judaisms
in response to this change. Is it not likely that earlier periods of
challenge in Jewish history might also have brought forth considerable
variations in the way in which Judaism conceived itself and its role in
society? If this were the case, there might be glimpsed some similarity
in pattern between Judaism and Catholic Christianity in their respective
developments in history. This is a question which Professor Neusner might
wish to consider in some future work of his.
Under any circumstances, since Jacob Neusner has written so
extensively on the nature of Judaism and its place in history, we have in
him an interpreter of history from the standpoint of Judaism whose work
challenges the secularized versions of world history which dominate the
intellectual landscape of our time. In addition, Christians will discover
in his thought a valuable aid to understanding the Jewish tradition and
the various ways in which it seeks to confront the contemporary crisis in
our culture.
Taken from the Winter 1993 issue of "The Dawson Newsletter." For
subscriptions send $8.00 to "The Dawson Newsletter", P.O. Box 332,
Fayetteville, AR 72702. John J. Mulloy, Editor